Take a look at the following list of jobs that were posted on the Omaha Careerlink website a while back…

Here you have six developer positions, all posted by the same recruiter – Aureus Group. (Not to pick on Aureus… they’re fine people… Its just the best screenshot I could get) Many of these positions have the salary listed right in the job title. At first glance, you’d think “Fantastic! I can skim the jobs and only apply for the ones that fall into the money category that I’m looking for! Hurray!”

Click through to those jobs though.. Notice anything similar with them? Here’s a listing of the companies that you’d be working for in these great jobs…

• Leader in the online world
• Industry Leader
• Privately held Service Bureau
• One of the largest financial services firm in the world

“Industry leader?”.. What the hell does that mean? As Joel so eloquently puts it..

For the job seeker, the problem is the same: when they look on giant job boards they see a bunch of undifferentiated jobs, often posted by clueless headhunters that provide all kinds of information you don’t need (“A leading provider of whatever”) and none of the information you do need (what’s the name of the company? Do they make nuclear bombs? Will they give me a private office and a big monitor? Free M&Ms? Are they sloppy hacks or quality hackers? Can I use Ruby on Rails?)

It seems to me, that the concept of skimming jobs based on pay is a backwards approach to job searching. Yes, if you’re using the apply-to-as-many-jobs-as-possible approach, just to see if you can get a bite, then that may be great for you. But the truly great developers, the one’s that we’re looking for, would rather approach it from another direction.

It’s pretty much unanimous from developers that they want to know what company that they’re going to…